I can totally relate. At seminary studying some of the arguments of modern Biblical criticism I sometimes found the arguments to be pretty far fetched – more incredulous than the straight forward reading of the text. It was hard to understand at times why they would bend so far backwards. Do these people believe in God at all? I wondered.
Yes I find numerical errors and exaggerations a bit more plausible example of errors in the Bible, and I attribute them to a widespread attitude of people at the time who simply didn’t bother to actually count such things with any attempt at accuracy. There was no motivation to count such things accurately as there is today and no doubt they would have just as hard a time with us for making such a big deal about numerical accuracy as we do.